DistributionWatch Review: SuSE Linux 7.0 Personal/Professional

Geeko the Gecko? Urgh!

September 29, 2000

By
Brian Proffitt

In the interests of full disclosure, I must
reveal that I participated in the "Name-the-SuSE-lizard" contest last
February at the Manhattan LinuxWorld. My entry of "Get the Hell Away From
Me You Big Green Thing!" did not win, for some reason, and I freely admit I
hold no bitterness towards SuSE for picking the name "Geeko" instead.
Really.

As the Linux community holds its collective breath waiting
for the 2.4 kernel, which is starting to get to be more anticipated than the Land of
Milk and Honey was to that bunch of lost Hebrews a few thousand years ago, each
new Linux distribution released these days gets scrutinized for
features that might help ease the wait.

Red Hat 7.0's recent release was ransacked by the user
community, looking for the next Big Thing. The response has been less than
overwhelming thus far. But while all the hoopla about Red Hat was going on here
in the States, the latest release from Deutschland has quietly been causing a
stir of its own, first in its home country, and now here.

SuSE Linux 7.0, the latest offering from the Germany-based
SuSE GmbH, comes in two distinct offerings--Personal and Professional--as well
as an Upgrade version for current SuSE users. Superficially, there is little
difference between the products, even in price. The SuSE Linux 7.0 Personal
costs a mere $39.95, the Upgrade version $49.95, and the Professional version
just $69.95, should you choose to pick them up off the shelf. Downloading is
available, as with most Linux distributions, but in this instance, I strongly
recommend plunking down the cash for this distro.

Tale of the Tape

The two versions I review here, Personal and Professional,
both come with well-written documentation, including (in the Professional
version) a very complete near-600-page Technical Handbook that answers a lot of
questions for both new and mid-level Linux users. The Configuration manual that
comes in both editions was also full of real-world examples to get you going
including a detailed section on getting an IDE CD-RW drive working with SCSI
emulation in Linux, something I personally have been wrestling with these past
few weeks.

The documentation alone is worth the price, not to mention
the ease of use you get having an enormous number of packages on hand to
install instead of having to find them online and then download them through a
small pipe, if you are so cursed.

How enormous? Well, the Personal edition, targeted at home
or office users who have had little to no exposure to Linux, ships with a nice
neat number of 700 apps, all on 3 CDs. The Professional edition shatters that
number with a whopping 1987 applications available, if you want them. Shipping
will all of those packages means a whopping 6 CDs come in the box, or, if
you've can handle it, one DVD.

The Upgrade version, geared to pull current SuSE users up to
7.0, includes all of the packages shipping with the Professional version--a nice
reward for current SuSE customers.

The installation support for both versions are pretty
standard for the industry: 60 days for Personal and Upgrade and 90 days for the
Professional edition. Other support includes a pretty large support database on
the SuSE Web site that I found easy to use in terms of functionality and
clarity. I ran searches for several terms and found on-target results for most
everything, though I had to try one search for CD writer drives a couple of
times to get it nailed down. Every article I found had an equivalent
translation in at least two other languages (usually French and German), with
Spanish and Czech translations appearing as well. Both versions promoted
support that was available via WAP cell phones, but I was unable to test this
feature.

The Professional version included an offer for a trial
membership in the Oracle Technology Network, and free Oracle software to
download and check out, which I also did not test.